In the summer of 2001, I talked to Fleda Brown about the idea of a project involving a set of poems written especially for use in a musical composition. I had just been asked by Kevin Noe to write something for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and my idea for a vocal piece was as intriguing to him as it was to me. I have set Brown’s poetry in the past. Fishing With Blood, for soprano and orchestra was written as a sort of “senior project” while I was an undergrad at Eastman, and a couple of years later I set two more poems of hers, Arch and Kitty Hawk for mezzo-soprano and piano. But the idea of a real collaboration from the ground up, so to speak, was a new one.

The current poet laureate of the state of Delaware, Brown is the author of four books of poetry, which include several poems on historical figures such as painters, artists, writers and the like. She has written on O’Keefe, Edward Hopper, Chagall, Emily Dickinson, and even Elvis Presley, with humor, poignancy, and beautiful lyricism, and I wondered what would be the result if she chose a subject for whom her voice was seemingly at odds. I mentioned Einstein (we were limited to male figures, since Kevin Noe had already raved to me about baritone Timothy Jones and then contracted him for the piece!) and she didn’t seem to respond at once to the idea. So I left for the American Academy in Rome (where I have spent the last year) and a few weeks later I learned that she had read several biographies on Einstein and had almost completed the first draft of a manuscript. We talked by phone about the shape of the piece and I decided it was best to simply let her write and I would worry about the musical form it would take later. I wanted her to be able to publish the poems exactly as she saw fit in poetry journals or as part of a future collection, and I didn’t want her to feel encumbered by the considerations a composer must make with regard to rhythm, pacing and proportion. I do remember saying that I hoped the audience would get the sense of a large-scale narrative arch and an almost operatic sense of completion by the end of the work.

She gave me the complete set of nine poems a few months later, and after playing around with it for several weeks I realized that its musical trajectory ought to be something very different than that which a set of nine discrete poems immediately suggests. Perhaps it’s just that I have become so weary of the song cycle, the kind of piece where you sit there in the audience and check off the poems as they go by, praying the next one will be set at a fast tempo! Or maybe it’s my current interest in broad, expansive musical forms that led me to the belief that Einstein on Mercer Street was particularly well-suited to a division into three large parts. I heard the first poem as an introduction in every possible way, but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the music before carrying on to the second poem. I imagined the ends of many of the poems spilling into the beginnings of others. So there are only two breaks, after Poem II (“...the mathematics we made of our marriage, / against the emptiness”) and after Poem IV (“...vast, primordial energy / you can never put your hands on again”) which in many ways feels like the climax of the piece. Poems V and VII are spoken, and another poem originally existed between what are now V and VI, but I felt strongly that “and in Germany, Hitler rose up / like all my dreams of deformed children, / children sinking in the waves, children lost” needed to flow directly into “I note the universe goes from order to disorder”, at least in a musical sense, and Brown ultimately decided to cut this poem from her manuscript as well.

Because there are places where I have rearranged the order of the text or even cut a line here or there for the sake of musical continuity, I have printed Brown’s manuscript below in its original version.

−Kevin Puts

Einstein on Mercer Street

While a student at the famous Polytechnic at Zurich, Albert Einstein fell in love with the only woman in his class, a Serbian named Mileva Maric, who at first was able to keep up with his mind. They talked physics and declared they’d never settle for a bourgeois life. Their first child, Lieserl, was born before Albert decided they could marry. They either gave her away or she died. Nothing is known about her.

They had two other children before their divorce. By this time, Mileva had given up her career and had sunk into a severe depression. A few years later, Einstein won the Nobel Prize and—even though he was married by then to his cousin Elsa—he sent Mileva all the prize money. Twenty-three years later, after Einstein had become a U.S. citizen and a professor at Princeton University, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. Einstein had nothing to do directly with the development of the bomb.